Servage.net Review
Servage.net are a company offering large amounts of shared hosting resources for a reasonable price - do they measure up?
Introduction
Whilst I work for a web hosting company I tend to keep my own sites separate. The rationale behind this is one part avoiding keeping all your eggs in one basket and one part division of responsibility. It is also two parts to the fact that at work we do not offer clustered hosting due to the use of CPanel / WHM, which makes this difficult to implement in practice. Using third party hosts also allows me to gauge our performance against theirs. What are other hosts doing? And are they doing it well?
Who are Servage?
Servage are a company offering high capacity clustered hosting allowing you to add unlimited domains. They are based out of Germany, although their website does not advertise this. The fact should really be in the pre-sales FAQ as many organisations will want to host in a country where they are fully familiar with the legal frameworks in place. This is not to say that you should expect any real problems hosting in Germany, but historical and games sites could fall foul of anti-Nazi legislation against the display of the Swastika. To my knowledge usage of the symbol in a Hindu context is not banned and neither is educational usage. However it goes to show that specialist legal knowledge may be required in the worst case scenario when hosting in another country. (For more info please see Wikipedia or contact applicable legal professionals.).
I enquired about this before signing up and was told by the founder of the company that you should adhere to the laws of your own country - this is a reasonable response however the terms of usage do not add that the laws of the country in which the content is hosted will also come into play and does not give an idea of what this jurisdiction is.
Bandwidth and disk usage allowances
At the time of writing the allowances have increased to 250GB webspace and 2100GB monthly data transfer. I can offer no comment on whether this sort of usage is honoured as my sites currently come nowhere near either of these limits. However the principle of overselling is almost certainly applicable however there is nothing wrong in this in and of itself - it is the principle on which the entire hosting and ISP industry survives in it’s current form. (Prices would be much higher without overselling.)
Closer examination of the Terms of service reveals the following.
“Customers are able to use 70 Gb daily totaling 2100 Gb in a normal 30 day month. A 28 day month provides 1960 Gb transfer and a 31 day month will allow a total of 2170 Gb transfer. Sites that consume over our daily limit on a regular basis period will be disabled and client must look into another Web hosting provider to accommodate those high bandwidth needs”
Whilst this is a reasonable daily limit, again it shows that reading the terms and conditions is always a must with web hosting. The clause is inflexible for those who actually wish to use servage for high bandwidth sites which may have peak times throughout the month or week, or would be happy to purchase extra bandwidth if they went over a daily limit.In reality, any dynamic site running this much traffic may fall foul of a limitation that is not mentioned in the terms of service or FAQ which certainly should be. When I asked the question on MySQL query limits I received the following on 01/08/06
“Per database per hour you are allowed to have
20\’000 updates
50\’000 questions
Please get back to us if you need any further clarification”
It isn’t that this limit is bad - just that where there are limits they should be clearly communicated before any money exchanges hands.
I believe from my own dealings with them that servage will suspend an individual domain / virtual host or database if necessary rather than the entire account, however there are postings on web hosting chat forums which suggest this is not always the case.
Control Panel
Because servage use clustered hosting they needed to roll their own control panel rather than use industry standard offerings such as Cpanel etc. The panel works, but currently has several major shortcomings
- Inadequate cron job configuration, these can only be daily or monthly which is useless for most applications. Proper unix style (or equivalent) configuration is required.
- Inadequate stats. Those used to awstats etc will find servage’s offering far too basic. The bandwidth count also often seems over estimated, but I can offer no evidence to back this up.
- No backup options. Somewhat understandable given the plausible size of an account, but some sort of backup create / restore ability is vital. The MySQL databases can be backup up, either by control panel or PHPmyadmin
- Poor choice of webmail client. Currently this is Squirrel Mail. Customers wishing to have webmail.theirdomain.com must install and configure this themselves. This is almost certainly going to be beyond a small business that may wish to utilise the groupware features of something like horde.
- No SSL configuration. Certs can however be installed on request.
- Very basic anti spam. There is no anti spam tool such as Spam Assassin, only a validation system by which all email must be manually verified via an automatic reply sent by servage to each email or whitelisted by the account owner. This is unsuitable for most users, especially considering that the verification email that is sent cannot be customised. For a business this is useless. Plus it can only be enabled per domain rather than per account, an exceedingly annoying limitation in those instances it would be useful.
What the control panel does, it does well. The ability to manipulate DNS records and change file ownership from and to the webserver is great. However it really needs work to make it compete with the alternatives.
Support
Support are prompt and polite, however they often reply in broken English and are not knowledgeable on all issues (no support operative ever is, however it is better to let the client know you are investigating and will get back to them rather than guess at the answer to an issue). Often you will need to prove the issue to support, which may well be beyond the knowledge of most shared hosting account owners.
I can use an issue with poor site response times as an example. Alertra reported that my sites were taking 30 seconds to load from all locations. My first ticket on this issue received a response that they were aware of a load issue and were investigating it. This continued for a couple of days and so I submitted further queries along with supporting evidence of slow load times. They denied there was any further problem without telling me why the evidence provided was erroneous but agreed to move my account to another cluster. Page response times have been fine since.
Support therefore is okay, but they could fore-go some of their promptness for a little bit more investigation and accuracy.
MySQL
When creating databases you have a choice of MySQL 4, MySQL 5 and MySQL5 remotely accessible. I often choose MySQL5 remotely accessible as I like to backup / administrate via MySQL administrator. However servage note the following
We recommend the normal MySQL v5 instead as it is more reliable and provides better performance.
Indeed, this blog not hosted on a remotely accessible MySQL is much faster than some other sites that allow remote connection to the database. I can’t fathom a decent reason why this should be the case, all databases should be able to have remote access hosts defined for them. Remote users placing unacceptable load on the system should be notified that if the pattern of usage is to continue, they should consider dedicated hosting.
Servage suggest that you use your ISP’s SMTP server when sending mail. This is incorrect if you are sending email from your servage hosted domain (i.e your mx records point at them) then your mail may fail sender verify and SPF checks if you send it through your ISP’s SMTP server (if your ISP even allow mail to be sent from an address not at their own domain). Whilst servage might have a decent reason for suggesting this, I can’t think of it off the top of my head. Only to reduce the load on their own servers.
Overall
I am happy with the ability to add unlimited domains, fiddle with the DNS zone as necessary, host lots of files, use a fair bit of bandwidth etc. However I have not tested the service “in anger” with my current sites. The control panel needs work - there are vital features both to a techie and a business user missing. I will likely only renew my account if these are added. The terms of service need to be more detailed on exactly what appropriate usage is with regards to limits for things such as MySQL database queries.
Servage are not a bad host, but if they addressed the problems outlined in this article, they could possibly be a very good one.
In conclusion, it is difficult to say who servage are targeting their product at. For those with Systems Administrator level knowledge the control panel is too basic (along with lack of shell access). For a standard business person, or even website designer the control panel just doesn’t do enough for me to be able to recommend the service.
Overall rating 6/10
Right to reply
I welcome comments from the subject of the review. You may find it better to email / PM these comments to me and after our discussion is complete the results will be added to a follow up article. Comment discussions are permitted on the blog but a considered dialogue is often better for both parties.
Rowan :: Mar.01.2007 :: Reviews, Web Hosting :: 17 Comments »
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Thank you for review. I would like to add that Servage hide the path to the php binary file, that may cause some php scripts may dont work.
Actually You can use Servage’s smtp server. Use smtp.servage.net and turn smtp authentication on. Or just read their FAQ for information - they have two different answers about using their smtp server and using one of their advices You can set everuthing up correctly.
sHinE - you’re right in that it looks like they’ve changed their FAQ since I wrote my review and are now not advising that customers always use their ISP’s SMTP server as was the case previously (or at least I can’t see the original entry - might just be missing it). This is good but in addition I’d like to see them offering SMTP on an additional port to 25 (26 or something) for those on ISPs that block that port.
They added a while ago an alternative port for the SMTP server (2525), and they now show the information for the smtp on the email info page.
I also agree that there is a lack of features is a no. of areas (the most important being the lack of raw access logs) but they also have something that other hosts don’t have (like the ability to set your PHP in safe mode or not, or whether to have register globals on or off).
They apparently are working on the control panel, and have been doing several important changes, like SSL hosting.
Anyway, i give them a 7/10
I am about to cancel my account with servage as their help with php scripting is the worst ever, they beat about the bush for a week then told me they couldnt do it for me and to get a web designer to do it. servage, not recomended
I’ve worked with people on many shared hosts, and Servage must be the best as far as programmers are concerned: unlike on many hosts, there’s full .htacess, mod_rewrite and ability to turn register globals off, etc.
Also, I have rarely seen the server load (usually 0.5 to 0.9) go above 1 whereas in comparison GoDaddy websites are consistently at load 4 to *16*!
All the PHP scripts seem to run extremely fast, but I admit I haven’t used a great deal of MySQL with Servage yet.
As far as shared hosting goes, they’re not bad at all.
I think load is somewhat relative to the power of the machine/ number of CPUs, although as you say 16 is probably a bit too high.
The speed has definitely improved since I started with them although I started turning off the php acceleration stuff straight away some time ago on new domains / virtualhosts as bizarrely this was causing serious slowdowns (haven’t tested it recently mind).
I think my requirements are somewhat high, I wouldn’t go with a shared host that didn’t offer mod_rewrite and basic htaccess configuration. The flip side of the coin I suppose is that whilst the ability to configure those options is good for script compatibility, its not always great for service stability.
With performance as it currently is however they’re a good replacement uptime wise for normal non clustered shared hosting.
I have a hosting account at servage.net and it turned out to be a big SCAM, they took my money and suspended my
account.
Reason: ” At this time today our servers have
served more than 428456 requests for your account.”
That’s nowhere in the terms of service, and they even don’t want to refund me.
This service is only ok for small websites, when you have more than 200-300 users daily, they will surly suspend the
account to keep their servers running.
They RUINED my growing traffic with this!!
I advice other hosting purchaser to STAY AWAY from servage if you want a professional and reliable hosting service
and not a service that shuts down your service when they want to.
Stefan, sorry to hear of your bad experience. Did they suspend the one domain / database with the heavy traffic or your entire account? I think many of us would be interested in this point.
I’d add a slight caveat, working for a webhost I know that any account is ALWAYS at risk of suspension should it use a disproportionate amount of resources / host insecure scripts / get compromised by a third party. None of my sites currently (including this one) are that busy or that important, but I’d certainly be forking out for a dedi as soon as one does simply for piece of mind…
I’ve been with Servage.net for 3 months, as of February 2008. My sites have been innaccessible 5 times during that period. Entire sites were “unable to be found on the server. SITES, not files.
Responses to support tickets say, “We’re aware of the problem. Please be patient.”
Once I couldn’t access any sites for over 8 hours.
Whenever I have asked them what caused the problem, I get no response.
There are also frequent database connection problems.
Another negative is their 5-day money back guarantee. There is no pro-rating. Once you sign up with them, you’re stuck - unless you get smart and decide to change hosts.
I am changing hosts.
Bottom line. Servage is a webmaster’s nightmare.
Awful Awful …..
I have used Servage for a few years to host domains, currently ten. These have all dissapeared. No information from them, I found out via a friend.
When I asked them about it their response was “we have had a problem with our storage, you have to restore from your own backups”.
I´m now looking elsewhere.
I am about to launch a website and the goal is of course to get a busy site with lots of users….
At the moment I am using servage, but after having read your posts I am a bit scared to use Servage for my website…
Which (affordable) host should I choose that won’t suspend my account or mess anything up for me, if I get heavy user traffic on my website?
Thanks….
Jake,
Generally speaking this depends on what you mean by “busy” and the architecture of your site as they do specifically limit the number of queries and amount of bandwidth per day . As you’re currently using Servage and are thus in the same boat as me I’d simply advise always having backups ready, such that at the point that your site “takes off” or worst case is suspended you can simply move it to a dedicated server or quality VPS and carry on. Any caching you can do to reduce the number of queries / processing and just serve up static HTML pages will help you fly under the radar of any issues to an extent.
Certain things such as the inability to access MTA logs, the expirations of messages stored on the mail server after set periods and the lack of proper statistics means I’ll probably be paying a bit more and moving to a VPS come my own renewal. If there was just a little more control of the above I’d be able to recommend servage as a good “stepping stone” to a dedi (provided you don’t need support) but as it is, I can’t
Hi mate,
I am now the guy with the shitty end of the stick. I am so sorry I hosted with this company.
Here is my thread on webhostingtalk.com.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=715028
Pros: Cheap, huge space
Cons: Everything else
If you have more than one website hosted there, or multiple domains/subdomains, if only one of them reach daily transfer limit, your full account with all domains will get blocked for full 24 hrs without possibility to enable it within “punish” time.
It’s not possible to setup different bandwith or capacity quota per domain, mail or ftp account. Their support is arrogant, they lie, and they often offer only empty phrases for answer. If you can reach em.
For last 5 days I cant login to my account, passwords are somehow changed and their password resetting system is broken. I cant fill ticket because I cannot login.
If I use my default mail for contact I got automated reply that my mail is already in their database so that I rather fill online ticket.
I cant call them because they don’t have (LOL) telephone number.
Their security is almost non existent. People reporting hacked sites non stop, slow databases, slow loading, bad support all around.
If you need site to brag with storage capacity use Servage, otherwise avoid like plague.
Servage will let you down when you need it most, like what happened to me today: I cannot upload my work: 600mb big interactive CD for my client because I cant log into my account or FTP, and that’s main reason why I paid for servage host.
Several months ago I made and deployed one flash game for my online gaming community (EVE online) into servage.
I suffered slash dot effect, bandwith got sucked and they blocked it for 24 hrs.
I even offered them money for extra bandwith, but they just said: not possible.
That flash game was made special for big patch day for that game, which lasted 24 hrs and it went offline 4 hrs after deployment. So my several days of work was almost wasted.
They advertise huge monthly bandwith.
But info about daily limit is well buried in their ToS.
Tf you try to fill full advertised space, your account will get blocked for some puny reason: cpu usage, max hits achieved, etc.
To choose servage or not?
You decision.